Okay, so this is entirely new to me. Sparrow is was an email client for Mac OS X and iOS (and Windows), which brought a decent Gmail experience to these platforms - as opposed to Apple's own not-so-good Gmail support and Google's Gmail iOS application which, well, is just a webpage. Google has now acquired Sparrow, and basically all hell has broken loose, to the point of Rian van der Merwe writing that 'we' lost "faith in a philosophy that we thought was a sustainable way to ensure a healthy future for independent software development, where most innovation happens".

You know, people that can't do plumbing at their home... contract plumbers. If a user can't program, he can contract programmers.

At what cost per billable hour?

Mozilla's only significant source of revenue is the add-click.

The mother lode.

But not enough to keep Thunderbird from being retired to maintenance mode.

Google abandons projects at a dizzying pace and it has money to burn.

It is one thing to call in a plumber for a routine installation or repair.

If you have an ambitious custom job mind, say construction of a garden pool and waterfall, you'll need a contractor, maybe an architect or engineer, who specializes in these things and can see the problem as a whole.

> > people that can't do plumbing at their home... contract
> > plumbers. If a user can't program, he can contract
> > programmers.

> At what cost per billable hour?
This would have to be negotiated. As you have the source code and can improve it, you (a company, a user, a group of users, etc.) have available a lot of developers to negotiate it with, and see if the improvement is worth the money. Anyway if there are better alternatives, people are not going to pay a lot...

> But not enough to keep Thunderbird from being retired to
> maintenance mode.
> Which means that the bill is likely to skyrocket.
You have more developers available than Mozilla. Other people may develop or contract someone to improve Thunderbird, though... I'm not going to pay Mozilla or another developer to improve Thunderbird because I don't use Thunderbird but another program. So I understand if they simply start using another program or keep using Thunderbird if it fits their needs.